Sunday, December 12, 2010

Top Bet

Ever since seeing Chow Yun Fat in God of gamblers I have been a sucker for HK gambling movies, I have seen most of them but I had never got around to Top bet, even though it is a sequel to a favourite of mine All for the winner . I watched the Joy sales dvd yesterday and although fun in places overall it was a disappointment overall, wasting a solid cast with thin characters and far too much mugging to camera (Ng Man Tat I'm looking at you). Stephen Chow who starred as Saint of gamblers in the original All for the winner has a cameo at the start of the film and returns briefly at the end but is missing for most of the running time, he is such a loss the writers decided to replace him with two characters, Anita Mui as his sister and Carol Cheng as a card cheat who becomes the queen of gamblers and although both are fine, neither is fleshed out enough and as a result neither are charismatic enough to carry the film in the way that Stephen Chow did in the original or Chow Yun Fat did in God of gamblers, this is the major problem with the movie as given more screen time, either actress could have pulled it off.
It is obvious that the film was made quickly and on a low budget and taking that into account it is a (barely) passable timewaster with a decent action scene, some fun gambling scenes and a few laughs along the way but it is nowhere near the best of the genre. The dvd looks and sounds about as good as it ever will as I cannot see this ever being remastered, and I don't think anyone will worry too much about that.

About Me

I discovered Hong Kong cinema over 20 years ago when Channel 4 showed a series of Hong Kong ghost stories which included screenings of Rouge and Encounters of the spooky kind. I watched them all and wanted more,next up was Jonathan Ross' Incredibly strange film show on Tsui Hark where they showed a clip of Chow Yun Fat hiding guns in plant pots from A better tomorrow and the shootout that follows. My mind was blown there and then but the thing that made me a fan forever more was seeing a trailer on a palace video release for The killer. Ever since I have been watching and spending far too much money on HK related goodies (and the kit to watch them on). The blog is somewhere to put my thoughts on my HK passion, a passion that refuses to die even though HK cinema is struggling at the moment.